[tmql-wg] Proposed requirements: Operations on primitive types

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Mary Nishikawa
| 
| This seems reasonable and necessary.

That seems to be the consensus based on the three replies so far, and
it is certainly also my own opinion.

| I think we need to revisit the question, "what are Topic Maps for
| anyway?"

I agree that this does touch on that question. I don't think we will
ever fully answer that, but in answering yes or no to this particular
issue I do think we narrow down what we think they are meant for.

| Where would topic maps fit in the storage and access of data objects?
| We would need it, if we are getting into this business. Are we?
| I really can't answer this.
| The subject comes up (storage of data types) with engineers whenever I
| discuss topic maps with then.

Yeah, I think there is no way around this. If you can't have numbers
in topic maps, what use will they be?
 
| It would be a valuable extension, but whether it should be in the
| requirements for the language is debatable, I think.

Debating it is what we're doing now. :-)

But, seriously, the reason to identify something as a number is so
that you can make use of this information to perform operations on
that number. The operations might be sorting, comparison, summation,
or simple arithmetic, but if you are not going to do any of those
operations you don't really need to know that it's a number, either.

So I do think these two things go hand in hand.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >